Kinlight · The British Royal Line

Alexander III of Russia

1845 – 1894 · Generation XXXIV · Emperor of Russia (r. 1881–1894)

Portrait of Alexander III of Russia

Alexander III (1845–1894) was Emperor of Russia from 1881 until his death, a ruler who kept his empire out of war abroad while undoing much of his father’s reforming work at home. He was born in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg on 10 March 1845, the second son of the future Alexander II and Marie of Hesse. Nobody expected him to reign, and he was given the ordinary education of a grand duke: some languages and a good deal of military drill.

Everything changed in 1865, when his elder brother Nicholas died. Alexander inherited his brother’s place as heir and, the following year, his brother’s fiancée. Princess Dagmar of Denmark took the name Maria Feodorovna on becoming Orthodox, and they were married in the Winter Palace on 9 November 1866. Arranged as it was, the marriage was a notably happy one. They had six children, five of whom grew up, the eldest being the future Nicholas II. Dagmar’s sister Alexandra was Princess of Wales, and summer reunions at the Danish court, where the tsar was free of the heavy guard that surrounded him in Russia, were among the pleasures of his life. As heir he studied law and government under Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who taught him to distrust representative government and to hold that zeal for Orthodoxy was a tsar’s duty, and he served in the war against Turkey in 1877–78, commanding the left wing of the army in Bulgaria. He and his father drifted apart, partly over policy towards Germany and partly over Alexander II’s long liaison with Catherine Dolgorukova.

On 13 March 1881 Alexander II was assassinated by members of the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya. That very day he had signed a decree creating commissions to advise the crown. His son cancelled it before it could be published and announced that the autocracy would not be limited. The years that followed are known as the counter-reforms. The elected local councils, the zemstvos, lost powers, peasant communes were put under officials called land captains, and Russian language and Orthodox religion were pressed on the empire’s non-Russian peoples, Poles and Finns among them. His reign was especially grim for Russia’s Jews. Pogroms broke out after his accession, and the May Laws of 1882 restricted where they could live and what work they could do, driving many to emigrate. A plot against his own life in 1887 ended with five conspirators hanged, among them Aleksandr Ulyanov, elder brother of the future Lenin.

For safety he moved his family out of the capital to Gatchina on 27 March 1881. There they lived in the small, low-vaulted rooms of the palace’s mezzanine floor. He was blunt, even gruff, in manner and had no taste for polished court society. His youngest half-sister remembered him among children as “a playful and kind Goliath”. When the imperial train was derailed at Borki on 29 October 1888, he was said to have held up the collapsed roof of the dining car while his children got out.

Abroad he preferred preparation to adventure, and Russia fought no major war while he reigned, which earned him the name of Peacemaker. His distrust of Germany grew, and when Berlin let its treaty with Russia lapse in 1890 he turned to France. The alliance concluded in 1892 reshaped European diplomacy, and the Pont Alexandre III in Paris commemorates it. At home, customs duties on imports were raised, industry grew, and work began on the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1894 he fell ill with kidney disease and travelled to the Crimea, where he died at Livadia on 1 November, aged forty-nine. He was buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg and succeeded by Nicholas II, the son he had thought too immature for the task.

Place in the family

  • Alexander III of Russia married Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark), a great-great-aunt of Queen Elizabeth II.

Images

Read more on Wikipedia

Partners

Children

Life

  • 1845 — Born
  • 1866 — Married Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark)
  • 1894 — Died

Sources

  1. Alexander III of Russia · Wikipedia
  2. Alexander III · Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Alexander III. (tsar) · Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), via Wikisource
  4. The Mezzanine Floor of the Arsenal Wing · Gatchina Palace and Estate Museum

Open Alexander III of Russia in the interactive tree